Campaign '04: Fighting For Every Last Vote

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Even as the two sides are pouring more resources than ever into the ground war, they have developed very different battle plans. The Kerry campaign has built the Democrats' largest ground operation ever, with an army of volunteers who last weekend were planning to knock on 1 million doors in 20 states. Among those who have joined the effort: Sarah Lawrence College president Michele Myers, who took a sabbatical and moved from New York to Ohio, where she is staying with a friend and working the phones each night for Kerry in the studio-apartment-size Licking County Democratic headquarters.

An even larger effort is under way through the $125 million campaign being waged by an outside group, America Coming Together (ACT), which is coordinating its effort and sharing its information with organizations representing environmentalists, women, labor and the poor. ACT claims to have made 3.7 million visits to voters' homes in Ohio alone. By law, such outside groups cannot work directly with the Kerry campaign, and their activists don't mention Kerry's name as they go door to door. Canvassers instead talk about Bush and use their Palm Pilots to show videos that are tailored to the interests of individual voters. ACT relies heavily on paid workers, such as 2,000 members of the Service Employees International Union who have taken leave from their regular jobs. The organization's goal is to make contact with targeted Democratic voters seven or eight times during the election season. Is there overlap with the Kerry operation? "I hope so," says Karen Hicks, who is running Kerry's ground war from the Democratic National Committee. "I hope we are crawling all over each other."

The Bush operation, on the other hand, is being run with an Amway-like business model from its campaign headquarters in Arlington, Va. Democrats have long been better than Republicans at the ground war--something Bush campaign workers learned the hard way in 2000, when the comfortable margin they were seeing in pre-election polls suddenly disappeared on Election Day. (Political professionals generally focus on polls of "likely" voters, which don't anticipate big surges in turnout.) In the last election, five polls in Ohio showed Bush winning by as many as 14 points; he actually squeaked by on fewer than 4. The Democrats "just beat the socks off the Republicans in 2000 on the ground," acknowledges J. Kenneth Blackwell, Ohio's Republican secretary of state.